THE BIBLE DOCTRINE CONCERNING THE TEMPTER CONSIDERED.
NUMBER 4.
From the premises now before us the inquiries concerning the tempter, may be analytically, numerically and concisely answered as follows:
1. When is ‘the beginning?’
Answer. It covers a space of several years, and includes the Creation-week; the probation before the fall, perhaps forty years, after the analogy of the forty days of Christ’s probation in the wilderness; Israel’s forty years under Moses; Judah’s forty years to the destruction of the temple; and the future forty years probation for the ten tribes under Elijah: it includes also, the Fall; and the subsequent murder of Abel, when he had attained to manhood and ripeness of character, at some time before the birth of Seth, Adam being then 130 years old.
2. Has not the ‘Devil’ a place ‘in the beginning’ as really as ‘the Serpent?’
Answer. If by the ‘Devil’ is meant the devil of the Bible, and by ‘the Serpent’ the reptile of which Moses writes, I answer, Yes: but, if by these terms is meant the gentile ‘Devil’ operating in and through a serpent, I answer that such a Devil possessed Serpent has no place at all in the alpha or omega of our world.
3. Was there not a tempter in Christ’s case personally distinct from Jesus?’
Answer. Yes. But that tempter was not a Serpent, nor ‘the Serpent;’ but one sustaining the character of a personal adversary to him.
4. If the tempter be distinct from Christ, the tempted, can we be safe, or justified, in departing from that idea?
Answer. We are not justified in so doing; therefore I have been careful to abide by what is written without regard to the glosses of ‘theology,’ and the petitio principii of ‘divines.’
5. Does not the term ‘Dragon’ in Revelation apply to Rome as the oppressor of Israel and the Church?
Answer. If by ‘Rome’ is meant, an imperial power established first on the totality of the Roman territory; afterwards restricted to the eastern division of it; and hereafter extending far into the western—with first, the city, ROME, and subsequently and finally, CONSTANTINOPLE for its throne—it does: but, if by ‘Rome’ is understood that city, and the imperial power of the west connected with it, since the removal of the throne to Constantinople, by Constantine, it does not. Rome is the Episcopal ‘throne of the Beast;’ Constantinople, the throne of the Dragon.
6. Did not the term ‘Dragon’ anciently represent the Sovereign of Egypt as well as its sovereignty?
Answer. Pharaoh, was the title common to all the meleki Mitzraim, or Kings of Egypt, as Czar is of all the Autocrats of Russia. It does not therefore define a particular person, any more than Czar means Peter the Great rather than Nicholas 1. In Egyptian, Pharaoh signifies the King; hence, ‘the Pharaohs’ indicates all the Kings of Egypt to its conquest by Nebuchadnezzar. The Pharaoh, then, is a power incarnate, defined in Ezekiel as that of ‘the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers’—Ezekiel 29: 3. The Pharaohship was the Egyptian Sovereignty—the kingly power symbolised by the most remarkable animal of the country, the Crocodile or Dragon of the Nile. The man, who was king for the time being, was the eyes and mouth or heading up of the power, nothing more. He did not give inspiration to the power, as ‘the Devil’ is supposed to have done to the Mosaic Serpent; but the power or Nile Serpent, inspired him. Without the pre-existence of the Egyptian Dragon, the man who was drowned in the Red Sea—the oppressor of Israel—would have been nothing. Jehovah addresses the power, not the individual who is the breath of the power, when he says,
‘I am against thee, Pharaoh, King of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself.’
A certain man might have occupied the throne contemporary with the delivery of the prophecy, while another might have been the actual ruler at the time of its accomplishment. That made no difference, however; the prophecy being spoken against the power, whenever it was fulfilled, whoever might occupy the throne, would fall with it.
The Gogue—Ezekiel 38: 2—is to the Assyro-Roman—Revelation 20: 2 what the Pharaoh was to the Dragon of the Nile—a Gentile Dynasty without regard to the particular man who happens to occupy the throne. The prophecy is against the power which gives inspiration to a man as its head, chief or prince, who is the Gogue for the time being. Like the Pharaoh ap aionas, at the beginning of the Mosaic kosmos, or world, the Gogue is ‘the oppressor of Israel’ in the latter days—he is the ‘Head of the Serpent’ or Roman Dragon, a power causing to transgress, and therefore DIABOLOS, or incarnate sin politically embodied. This Assyro Roman Dragon to which the Gogueship belongs is Isaiah’s Dragon of the Sea, represented by him as contemporary with the resurrection of Jehovah’s dead ones.
‘In that day,’ saith the prophet, ‘Jehovah with his sore, and great, and strong SWORD (Messiah and his host) shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the Dragon that is in the Sea’—Isaiah 27: 1.
The Egyptian and Assyro-Romaic dragons are both alluded to by David—Psalm 74: 14, and the leviathan also as having a plurality of heads. Of these the Gogueship is the last. ‘Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him as meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.’—These people are the twelve tribes under Moses; and their descendants hereafter under Jesus, ‘the Lord of hosts,’ and Elijah, the restorer of all things; who shall break in pieces the seven-headed leviathan, even ‘the Assyrian, who shall fall with the sword, not of a mighty man, not of a mean man’—Isaiah 31: 8, but of God the Almighty; ‘for, by fire, and by his sword will Jehovah plead with all flesh; and the slain of the Jehovah shall be many’—Isaiah 66: 15-16.
Our friend, the inquirer touching the tempter, seems to think that a man called Pharaoh was to the Nile-Dragon, as the supposed person, called ‘the Devil,’ was to the Eden-Serpent; therefore he inquires,
7. Why not allow ‘the Serpent’ and ‘the Devil’ both the precise place they occupy in Scripture?
Answer. That is exactly what I have aimed to do. ‘Divines’ have studied Milton more than the Law and the Testimony on this subject; hence they have got hold of it at the wrong end. They have assumed the pre-existence of devil; so that it is with them first devil, then serpent; but the scriptures exhibit it as the serpent first and then diabolos. This is equally the order of things political as of things Mosaic. The dragon serpent of the Nile, or Rahab, and the dragon-serpent of the Sea, or Assyria of the Latter Days, are both antecedent to the diabolism and Satanism ascribed to them. ‘Devil and Satan,’ are surnames bestowed upon the Dragon-Serpent. Adam called the Mosaic reptile nahchahsh, or Serpent, most likely from its power to charm. This was its original name. But when its suggestions were responded to, and Adam by his act sinned, or crossed the law-line, and so introduced sin into the world, which, acting in, by, and through, mankind, originated and organised, politically, the dragon-power, that power retained the name Serpent as its patronymic; and because of the relations it sustains to God’s nation and land, which are deceitful, enticing, and adverse, it has received the additional names, expressive of its character, diabolos and satanas. These surnames are descriptive of a power, not of a person, in the texts where they occur. Its first appearance in the Apocalypse is as ‘a great red dragon’ ‘in the heaven,’ ‘having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon its heads.’ John saw this in vision, and styles it a seemeion, or ‘sign in the heaven;’ and therefore representative of something there. It was the Sign of a destroying power; for it sought to destroy a certain child about to be born, ‘in the heaven’ also. A war ‘in the heaven’ ensued between this destroying power and the partisans of the new born child. Its object was the expulsion of the great red dragon-power from the heaven. The enterprise succeeded, and no place was found any more for it and its adherents there.
This great red dragon power was of considerable antiquity. For 280 years antecedent to its expulsion, that is, from the crucifixion, it had been the adversary, and JUDICIAL ACCUSER (ho kateegoros) of those who ‘kept the commandments of God, and the testimony of Jesus Christ,’ styled by the partisans of the child who expelled him, ‘our brethren.’ His accusations were incessant, giving them no rest by day or by night. But ‘steadfast in the faith,’ they resisted him valiantly; yea, with a valour that ought to put to shame the downy, drowsy, narrow-souled, professors of our day. Their faith in the Lamb and the testimony overcame all the Dragon-power’s endeavours to turn them after itself. Their constancy was victorious, ‘for they loved not their souls (teen psycheen autoon) unto death.’ Their Souls were tortured unto death, because they ‘would not accept deliverance’ at the price of apostasy, ‘that they might obtain a better resurrection’—Hebrews 11: 35. This savage power, a principal element of which were the institutions of a cruel and debasing idolatry, ‘deceived the whole habitable,’ civilised, or Roman, world (ho planoon teen oikoumeneen holeen.) These things being affirmed of it; that is, its being the deceiving power of the world, and the adversary and judicial accuser of the Saints, and the enemy off Israel’s Commonwealth, God has surnamed it ho Diabolos and ho Satanas.
This apocalyptic sign probably suggested the notion elaborated in Paradise Lost by Milton, of Satan with his rebel hosts being once holy angels in heaven, whence before Adam’s day they were expelled for impiety and insurrection against God! ! But the conception is as wild and unscriptural as a poet’s imagination can well be without actual insanity. It is true, that certain ‘angels kept not their beginning, but deserted their own abode,’ and that ‘having tartarised,’ or cast them down (tartaroosas) God ‘committed them to perpetual bonds under intense darkness in accordance with a judgment of a great day.’ But the judgment executed upon these angels has consigned them to destruction. They are all prisoners of death, none of them having liberty to roam over God’s universe as the Devil is fabled to have done, seeking what portion of his glorious work they might throw into confusion in revenge for the overthrow they had received. This is a mere fiction of the poets. Jude does not say that they are ‘reserved unto the judgment of the great day;’ but eis krisin megalees heemeras—‘by, or in accordance with, a judgment of a great day—God hath consigned them to perpetual bonds under intense darkness.’ There is no escape from this sentence; so that, wherever the gentile Devil, or Satan of the poets, hales from, he cannot trace his genealogy to the archangel of the rebel host, whose fall was not from heaven, but a repression to his original sphere which it was unlawful for him to leave. Their bonds are aidian or perpetual; as existent now as when first imposed. ‘The Devil and Satan’ of the Bible are yet unbound. They are in rampant liberty, and will continue free, until the earth-enlightening angel, the Messiah, shall descend, and bind their original for 1000 years.
This original, the great red dragon, surnamed the Devil and Satan, did not, like the pre-Adamic angels, voluntarily leave his place in the heaven, but was forcibly expelled. He was cast out off the Apocalyptic heaven into the apocalyptic earth by intestine war. He kept his place as long as he could; but being defeated by Constantine, he lost the throne off the habitable, called ‘the throne of God,’ because it was conquered from the dragon by his people. But, though defeated, he had not lost all power, though his time was short, as he well knew. The imperial Roman idolatry had lost the throne, but it still retained the provinces of ‘the earth and sea.’ These were still under his jurisdiction, which he exercised in ‘great wrath,’ especially upon those ‘inhabiters’ of them, who, by their devotion to Christ, were known to be in sympathy with the enemy that had expelled them from the heaven of the Roman world—Revelation 12: 3-12.
With these words, I think I may now dismiss the further consideration off the inquiries touching the tempter, without incurring the imputation of indefiniteness, or evasion. The subject of diabolos and Satanas is far from being exhausted. In leaving behind me Mr. Cook’s queries, I shall not therefore turn my back upon the topic in hand; but, requesting the reader to correct for himself a few typographical errors that have escaped the eye of my compositor, not, however, affecting the sense at all, I propose to continue the investigation of the matter in the ordinary course of publication.
EDITOR.
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Many strange things have been proved true in our day. An open mind is the best mark of a philosopher. But we regret to say that indications of a philosophic temper have been nowhere so rare as in connection with the question, what is the truth, the great leading truth, of Moses and the Prophets? The closest students of their writings have been denounced, the most honest men discredited, the plainest testimonies scouted, and a dogged determination as far as possible shown that the evidences should not be examined. Such is the infatuate devotion of blind attachment to “organised theology”—it fears to investigate lest its discoveries should reveal the worthlessness of the system by which its zeal is kindled and sustained.
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